Here in New England, signs of what writer/ecologist Jeremy Lent calls “the First Extermination Event” are everywhere, above all in crashing avian and insect populations. Below, an excerpt from a 2021 essay first published in the vibrant pages of Resilience. Every word still rings true, as ominously silent summer meadows confirm.
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As Eileen Crist brilliantly documented back in 2019, deep-sea mining is not only a grim prospect for the future; it is a reality in the present via exploratory permits and temporary leases, perversely spun as essential for the fabrication of “green tech.” Crist writes:
In case you have never heard the term “hungry ghosts,” they are archetypal beings with extremely narrow throats and obese bellies, so that no matter how much they eat they never get enough. Never enough. Forever hungry. “Always encroaching,” in the words of Native American Shawnee Chief Tecumseh.
To refer to the vast oceans on Mother Earth as “the common heritage of humankind” in the midst of an accelerating extinction event, together with a deepening climate emergency, represents human supremacism at its most omnicidal extreme. In that same essay, Crist goes on to write:
HUNGRY GHOSTS DEVOUR THEIR LAST MEAL
We stand with the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition and others who say NO to the terminal meal of the Hungry Ghosts.
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